'Bully' fights back

Alex Libby's story as a kid smacked around every day is among those depicted in "Bully."

Alex Libby's story as a kid smacked around every day is among those...

"Bully" arrives in theaters already famous because of the filmmakers' struggles over its MPAA rating. Initially, the MPAA saddled it with an R rating on the basis of a few f-words. After considerable protest by producer Harvey Weinstein, director Lee Hirsch and others, the rating was amended to Unrated - then changed again, just last week, to PG-13. That's the rating it should have received in the first place because it means that now kids can see it, and kids really do need to see this picture.

"Bully" is a very good documentary but one that's elevated to a status beyond its apparent virtues by its sheer usefulness: This movie really does have the power to save lives. It might save 10 kids or a thousand, or maybe just one, but just that one is more than enough to justify every public-relations machination of Weinstein's master design. The faces of those parents whose children have committed suicide over bullying are haunting. There is pain there that no time will heal and only the grave will alleviate.

But, you might ask, how could a documentary about bullying save kids' lives? Certainly, it won't affect bullies because bullies are sadistic morons, not inhibited by conscience or reason. And as for the poor victims of bullying, there's not much they can do about their problem, although after seeing this film, they at least might feel more encouraged to seek help or think twice before killing themselves.

More Information

'Bully'

Rated PG-13: For some language

Running time: 99 minutes

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In fact, "Bully" will be most useful in changing the behaviors of two categories of people who aren't bullies or victims: average kids in school and school administrators.

As an example of the first, I'll just say that when I was a kid I was neither a bully nor a victim. But throughout grammar school and junior high, it never once crossed my mind to stand up for other kids who were being bullied. I simply assumed that bullying was a fact of my world, and I was relieved that the devouring lions had found a few zebras even slower than I was. But if I'd seen this movie, it would have been a different story. "Bully" will make average kids want to gang up on bullies and protect the weak.

Meanwhile, school administrators will see this movie and experience horror. First, they will feel the sympathetic horror of seeing the human misery they cause when they turn a blind eye - anguish, terror, even death. But second, they will feel the empathetic horror of watching the administrators in "Bully" exposed on camera, and before all the world, as smug, self-satisfied and thunderously, cataclysmically and world-shakingly useless.

One scene will make your skin crawl: An assistant principal forces a bullying victim to shake hands with the bully who has been tormenting him - as though a handshake will help. What's particularly disturbing is that this assistant principal hardly seems stupid but rather willfully obtuse, choosing to ignore a problem that's difficult in favor of solving a lesser problem that she knows isn't really there. This is dereliction of duty to a degree beyond ineptitude and into a realm very near immorality.

"Bully" follows a handful of schoolkids, including Alex, a shy, awkward boy who gets smacked around every day on the bus (and the camera records this); and Kelby, a lesbian in Oklahoma. As soon as Kelby came out, people in the community stopped talking to her parents. Amazing. Indeed, "Bully" makes Oklahoma look like one of the most awful places to grow up in the United States, though I have to admit one person in this film shook my urban bias to the foundation.

I'm talking about Kirk Smalley, whose little boy shot himself because he was afraid to go to school. To my ignorant eyes, Smalley, tall and rail thin, looked like something out of the Dust Bowl, like someone about to be photographed by Dorothea Lange. And then this man started talking into the camera about his son - and later to a group of people on the subject of bullying - and every word out of his mouth was pure, true and unconsciously eloquent.

I could sit at this keyboard and write for a month, and I'll never be able to come up with words so full of feeling, and yet so dignified and so elevated by a concern for others. That's an extraordinary man, and this is an extraordinary picture.

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